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Ancient Greek Language Support
for LibreOffice / OpenOffice
Version: 1.6-beta8

Character Insertion dialog^

Ibycus Keyboard Layout is really handy, but it poses a certain difficulty to remember all the key combinations that would produce characters which are "out of the ordinary".

The Character Insertion dialog (shown bellow) comes to help in this respect.

ibycus-insert-char.jpg
The Character Insertion dialog on Windows 8.1

The dialog can be activated by pressing "Ctrl-8" on Windows and Linux or "⌘8" on Mac OS, given that the layout is active.

The available characters are divided in several groups, so that the dialog size remains within reasonable limits.

Characters encoded in a Unicode PUA are denoted with an asterisk , referring to a warning message that this character may not render correctly.

Clicking on a character button closes the dialog and inserts the corresponding character to the document.

About PUAs (Private User Areas)^

Unicode PUAs (Private User Areas) are ranges of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. The code points in these areas cannot be considered as standardized characters in Unicode itself.

Many people and institutions have created character collections for the PUA. Some of these private use agreements are published, so other PUA implementers can aim for unused or less used code points to prevent overlaps. Several characters and scripts previously encoded in private use agreements have actually been fully encoded in Unicode, necessitating mappings from the PUA to other Unicode code points.

Some of the more well-known and broadly implemented PUA agreements are maintained by the ConScript Unicode Registry (CSUR), the Medieval Unicode Font Initiative (MUFI), SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) and TITUS (German "Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien").

In practice, the correct rendering of a PUA character depends entirely on the font set for this character. If the font implements this character, it will render correctly. If it's not, the program will try to find a suitable substitute (as it always does in this case), but the possibility of failure to do so increases due to the character's definition (within a PUA, that is).